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KOA Rapid City, Rapid City, South Dakota. Tachometer – 3722 miles

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We saw two manmade, larger than life monuments today: The famous Mount Rushmore and the even more impressive Crazy Horse Memorial. They are both located here in the Black Hills and both draw millions of tourists every year.

We started the morning with a staunch demand from Ron to return to the jumping pillows in the playground, but alas all was wet from the rain last night and we had to depart. We drove for 30 minutes and reached Crazy Horse Memorial, a privately funded operation with a very ambitious goal. You may recall from some earlier posts, Crazy Horse was a Lakota Indian who led his people in battle against the white man. He was killed during a truce by a soldier who stabbed him in the back. He was 37 at the time. Because he never signed a treaty with the white man, and refused to live on a reservation, he became a hero to more than just his tribe.

Skip to the 30’s. A young Polish American sculptor by the name of Korzac something is invited by a Lakota elder to come from New York to South Dakota and sculpt Thunder Mountain into Crazy Horse riding on his horse. The white man isn’t the only one with heroes, he said. Korzac started blowing away at the mountain, the first ten years by himself. He refused government funding because he believed in the free enterprise system and that only people who are interested in this project should pay for it. Skip 50 years forward to the late nineties, and only the head has been completed so far. It is 9 stories high though! When completed, the entire monument will be taller than the Washington Monument in DC.

Mount Rushmore, 2 hours later, is a national memorial that stared as an idea in the 1920’s by a local South Dakota politician to attract tourists to the region. He invited a famous sculptor who convinced him to switch the characters from western heroes to US Presidents. The sculptor chose Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. The monument is very impressive and we took a tour with a very passionate ranger who explained about the changes that were made while sculpting due to problems with the granite.

All in all a very interesting day of manmade wonders. We are now camping in Rapid City, the regional big town, where it started raining in the afternoon and thwarted an extended visit to the playground. Tomorrow we hope to head out east to the Badlands.

Good night,

-Hemi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Big Trip, North America RV 2007, South Dakota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.